by Emily Margaretten, Matthew Reagan and Oden Taylor

CalMatters

More than half of parenting college students drop out before attaining a degree. For these families, graduating during a pandemic was a special victory. Their experiences shed light on how California could better support the growing ranks of student parents.

When Charity Machado had her first child, Cali, at the age of 15, she expected many of the sacrifices that came with being a young mother, but was determined not to let her education be one of them. Machado completed her general education requirements at Sacramento State before transferring to the nursing program at CSU Stanislaus in 2020.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit six months after her transfer, shutting down schools and daycare centers overnight.

Cali, now nine years old, remembers the transition to remote learning as “kind of crazy.” Machado recollects “survival mode.” Dishes and laundry piled up to the point where Cali and her 4-year-old sister knew that plates would be in the sink and clean clothes in the dryer.

Her mother helped with childcare and household chores, but Machado still struggled to keep up with her own studies on top of Cali’s.

“And that made me feel really bad,” Machado said. “Because I’m trying to instill the importance of education, and then there I was neglecting her schooling in order to complete mine.”

According to a March 2021 report on student parents from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, what Machado experienced is common and is known as “time poverty.” It is one of the most often cited reasons why, nationally, over half of parents who enroll in college for the first time end up dropping out within six years without attaining a degree.

That’s part of the reason why Machado’s graduation, along with those of her fellow student parents, represents a special moment of triumph and celebration. Their educational journeys — during which they juggled parenthood, classes and an ongoing global pandemic — also provide insight into how California’s higher education systems can better serve this growing group of students.

While the disruption caused by COVID-19 exacerbated many of the obstacles student parents face in their day-to-day lives, it also pushed colleges to experiment with hybrid instruction and flexible due dates, making academic life more manageable for some.

A March 2021 analysis of financial aid applications from researchers at the University of California Davis identified more than 200,000 student parents enrolled at campuses in California. The majority of student parents — 72 percent — are enrolled at one of the state’s community colleges, 12 percent are enrolled at a Cal State campus, and 1 percent are enrolled at a UC campus.

Among the student parents graduating from California community colleges this year was Yessenia Cervantes.

Graduating from Riverside Community College was especially sweet for Cervantes, since she already had to drop out once, after she separated from her husband and had to leave her home. Managing remote learning while living in hotels and with family members was often overwhelming, Cervantes said, largely because she lacked access to reliable Wi-Fi or hotspots.

“There were also a few times where we walked to McDonald’s, which was across the street, to connect to the free Wi-Fi. Ultimately it was too much work, where I decided to withdraw from my spring term 2020 and did not continue (for) fall term 2020. And my children were also not able to finish the remaining two months of school,” she said.

A year later, now with stable housing, a new van and reliable internet access, Cervantes “returned” to RCC in January 2021 — this time remotely and alongside her kids as they attended their own virtual classes.

Cervantes said that not having to commute to drop off and pick up her kids helped to ease some of the scheduling pressures. It was special that her kids saw the work she was putting in for the family, she added.

“It’s not the same every single day; one day can be marvelous and the next not,” she said. “It’s not perfect, but I like that my kids are there, they see me cry, they see the struggle, and, you know, it’s little things like that.”

The expansion of remote learning accelerated by COVID-19 created increased flexibility for students like Cervantes as “it eliminated travel time to school while reducing transportation costs such as parking,” the Institute for Women’s Policy Research report notes.

For 2022 Cosumnes River College graduate Arnoldo Fernandes, the boom in asynchronous classes helped him stay in school while navigating major life changes.

Arnoldo enrolled in 2018. A year later, while sitting in his communications class, he locked eyes with Olivia, a fellow student working on her associate’s degree in sociology. The duo married in an intimate backyard wedding in February 2021. That fall, they welcomed a baby boy, Manuel, into their young family.

Both were determined to continue their education and earn their degrees. For Arnoldo, the ability to watch classes on his own time was a lifeline.

“The asynchronous classes I really vibed with. Those ones are much easier to keep track of stuff,” he said. “So, you know, asynchronous was better for me.”

Beyond time constraints, expenses such as childcare and food make college nearly twice as costly for student parents as it is for their counterparts without children, according to a recent report from the California Student Aid Commission.

The average additional cost per child to attend college in California is $7,592, estimates California Competes, a research and advocacy group focused on higher education and the workforce. The cost varies by region, from $7,143 in the Inland Empire to as much as $10,000 in the Bay Area.

Student parents who receive financial aid through the state’s CalGrant program can qualify for an additional grant of as much as $6,000. But demand for Cal Grants exceeds the amount the state offers, a problem some lawmakers are trying to fix.

Cervantes said state and county-funded programs helped her cover some essentials including groceries, school supplies and gas, as well as her cap and gown for graduation.

For many student parents, though, the cost of childcare alone can be crippling.

Stephanie Webb, a parent of a three-year old and doctoral student in environmental studies at the University of California Santa Cruz, enrolled her son in daycare when he was an infant, cobbling together two half days per week so she could have time to work on her dissertation.

“I was paying so much for daycare, piecemealing it together. Every little 40 minutes of work was just vital,” Webb said. It also was expensive. The half days cost $750 a month. With the daycare center located 35 minutes from her home, Webb studied at a nearby Jack in the Box to avoid spending more time and money on the commute.

The game changer came when a subsidized child care center at UC Santa Cruz told Webb it had an opening for her son. She had originally signed up when she was five months pregnant. Two years later, she was off the waitlist.

Webb finally could devote more time to her studies and feel secure that her son was in a nurturing environment where he received three square meals a day, something Webb could not always afford at home.

According to University of the Pacific sociology professor and student parent researcher Susan Mannon, years-long wait times for campus child care facilities are not uncommon.

“I also work at Sacramento City College, and you know, the waitlist for their childcare center is just astronomical; we can’t even hope to get on it,” she said.

Mannon said waitlists are so long in part because colleges are spending less money on on-campus childcare than they did in the past. For Mannon, seriously supporting student parents would mean institutions investing resources in accessible, affordable childcare options.

“You know, they talk the talk, but they don’t walk the walk at all. But I mean, childcare is an obvious one. I mean, if you could have onsite childcare, it would make a huge, huge difference.”

Even with child care solved, Webb still struggled to afford California’s high cost of living. The breaking point occurred this spring when she realized that she might not graduate after seven years of being a graduate student at UCSC. Unlike other students, Webb could not take a leave of absence to finish her dissertation. She needed to stay enrolled at UCSC — and pay tuition — to qualify for childcare. But the responsibilities were piling up.

“I sent an email to everybody in my department and the social studies department and was just like, ‘Hey, I’m never going to get out of here if I have to TA (teach) or GSR (do research for a professor’s project) and do my dissertation and be a parent,’” Webb said.

Webb asked them to help cover her $4,600 quarterly tuition. The email worked. A university resource center for non-traditional students stepped in, helping Webb apply for scholarships that ended up covering most of her tuition.

Webb’s situation resonated with the mission of the center, known as STARS, said its program director, Jannet Ceja.

“She really needed the funding to finish her program and get childcare. And this was the quarter when it all had to happen,” Ceja said. Webb is now set to graduate in August.

Similar experiences to Webb’s were outlined by researchers in the UC Davis report on student parents in California community colleges. It emphasized the impact that campus-based resources and support staff can have on students’ chances of earning their degrees. “Increasing access to local supports” and “increased program flexibility” would help campuses to retain student parents, the report’s authors found.

A bill pending in the Legislature would mandate some of the policies the report recommends. Introduced by Assemblymember Marc Berman, a Palo Alto Democrat, Assembly Bill 2881 would require public colleges and universities to give student parents priority registration for classes so they can build more accommodating schedules. They would also be required to create web pages for student parents with links to campus resources and tips on how to apply for federal Women, Infants, and Children grants.

Priority registration could make a big difference for student parents, said Olivia Fernandes, who like her husband is headed to Sacramento State in the fall.

“It’d be a lot more helpful to be able to pick the classes that we actually need, that won’t put us in situation of, like, now we have to tell our professor, ‘I know I signed up for your class, but I can’t attend mandatory seven o’clock meeting on Zoom because I have my child to take care of,’ ” she said.

Mannon said another basic, but important step institutions can take is to learn how many student parents they actually serve — a number not recorded on many campuses.

“The low-hanging fruit is just identifying your student parent population, right — understanding who they are, how many you have, and what their needs are.”

For Machado, the CSU Stanislaus nursing student, the stress and sacrifice of schooling paid off. By graduation, a local hospital had offered her a job in its labor and delivery unit, and Machado said she was looking forward to the next chapter in her life.

At her commencement ceremony in May, when it was time to place the pin on Machado’s white coat, Cali joined the stage with her mother.

“She has been a part of my whole schooling journey. So, it’s special,” Machado said.

Margaretten is a contributor to and Taylor is a fellow with the CalMatters College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. Reagan is the Network’s program manager. This story and other higher education coverage are supported by the College Futures Foundation.

by Alexei Koseff

Working regular overnight shifts has distorted Samantha Kadera’s sleep schedule, so the emergency room doctor smokes cannabis a few times a week to relax before bed.

It’s a common habit among the young parents that Kadera knows in Manhattan Beach, the upscale Los Angeles suburb where she moved last year to raise her two elementary school-aged children in a more family-friendly environment.

But there are no dispensaries in the city; officials banned them five years ago after voters legalized recreational cannabis in California, concerned about attracting criminal activity and advertising aimed at minors. So Kadera stops at a store on her way to and from the Westside L.A. hospital where she works.

Changes loom if Manhattan Beach residents approve an initiative this fall to allow as many as two licensed cannabis businesses. It has triggered an increasingly acrimonious battle between a local entrepreneur eager to gain a foothold in a fresh market and city leaders determined to protect what they see as the character of their community.

“They do like to keep us in a bubble,” Kadera, 40, said one evening as she strolled with her dog along the Strand, a beachside path lined with multimillion-dollar homes. “But the reality is, there’s widespread use, so it would be nice to have it around here.”

Rapidly shifting attitudes — and a nascent legal industry still struggling to stabilize itself — have thrust cannabis back onto ballots across the state, six years after voters approved Proposition 64 to authorize Californians who are at least 21 years old to buy, grow and use it for recreational purposes.

A provision in that 2016 measure gave local governments discretion to ban cannabis businesses — and the vast majority of them did. More than 60% of cities and counties do not allow retail sales, according to the state, and while most of California’s most populous places do permit dispensaries, there are strict limits in many of them.

Desperate to expand where they can operate and to compete with a still-dominant illicit market, many in the cannabis industry have pushed state leaders to override Prop. 64 and open the entirety of California to retail sales.

But it’s a nonstarter at the state Capitol, where local control generally rules the day. A bill this session that would have only required local governments to permit medical cannabis businesses was quickly scaled back to a guarantee for patient access to delivery options.

So frustrated cannabis users and companies are turning their attention to the local level, launching municipal campaigns to pry open the holdouts, one at a time.

‘Voters have lost their patience’

Hirsh Jain, founder of the cannabis consulting firm Ananda Strategy, has tracked about two dozen cities over the past year — from Red Bluff to Sausalito to Santee — where citizen initiative drives are qualifying for the ballot or pressuring local officials to develop their own ordinances to regulate and tax cannabis sales.

“The ballot initiative is a way to get the elected officials to stare reality in the face that their citizens want this,” Jain said, pointing to a fall 2019 poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies that found public support for legal cannabis had only increased since Prop. 64. Nearly two-thirds of respondents favored allowing commercial dispensaries in their communities.

“Voters have lost their patience,” he said. “They might be willing to cut their elected officials some slack, but after a while, they’re going to take matters into their own hands.”

Enter Elliot Lewis, a self-described “motherf—ing hustler to the core” and the founder of Catalyst Cannabis Co., which operates 11 dispensaries, mainly in Southern California. He and fellow executives at the company are aggressively pursuing a strategy to force their way into cities that continue to ban retail cannabis sales.

They have funded initiatives to require dispensary licenses in Manhattan Beach and three of its neighbors in the South Bay — Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach and El Segundo — which each represent a crown jewel of the untapped legal cannabis market: wealthy and touristy, with a voter base that firmly backed Prop. 64. Voters in all four cities will get a chance to weigh in on permitting cannabis sales in either November or next March.

In his profane and zealous style — alternately hilarious and intimidating — Lewis defends his approach as more than a business venture. It is a political statement, a frontal assault on the principle of local control that he believes the “Karens and Chadwick Moneybags” who run city governments worship with Biblical reverence, often flouting the will of their own constituents.

“You’re talking about cocktail-party-donor people. I don’t think they understand where the zeitgeist of the younger generation is,” Lewis said. “You’ve metaphorically got to take a gun to their head, because that’s just how they operate.”

‘It doesn’t fit with our community’

The rising tension over the future of cannabis access in California is perhaps best captured by Manhattan Beach, a surfing hotspot of 35,000 residents, most famous for its iconic concrete pier.

Though 62% of the city’s voters supported Prop. 64, officials remain skeptical about cannabis dispensaries. City council members say there has been no groundswell of demand for retail sales among their constituents, including some who complain about being duped and coerced into signing the initiative petitions.

“It’s about money. There’s a lot of money in the South Bay and the dispensary owners know this,” Mayor Steve Napolitano told CalMatters in an email. “So why have pot shops that residents don’t need or want, just to enrich a few owners?”

To fight the initiative, the council directed city staff last month to develop competing measures for the November ballot that would uphold the ban on dispensaries and establish regulations, including a 25% sales tax, to make opening a dispensary prohibitively expensive.

“It doesn’t fit with our community. It certainly doesn’t fit with the development of our community,” said Hildy Stern, a Manhattan Beach councilmember who served as mayor this spring while the city debated how to respond to the initiative.

Stern, a mother of four who said she could not remember how she voted on Prop. 64, called it “distressing” that retail cannabis sales might be imposed by outsiders whose values do not fit with Manhattan Beach’s “small-town, family-oriented nature.” The city banned public smoking and tobacco sales in recent years — rare steps even for liberal California — to reduce beach pollution and vaping by students.

“I do not feel that the retail sale of cannabis in Manhattan Beach is appropriate,” Stern said. “I really am concerned about how access increases normalization to our youth.”

‘It cheapens a high-end beach town’

That sentiment has framed the public debate in Manhattan Beach, which prides itself on its top-performing schools.

Loading up her car with groceries outside the Vons downtown, Amy McAvin, 51, a bookkeeper who has lived in the city her whole life, said she worries about cannabis becoming even easier for kids to get.

A mother of two teenagers, McAvin assumed her children would use cannabis, so she encouraged them to develop safe habits, such as only smoking in social situations and not driving afterwards. She said she smoked herself when she was younger and voted for Prop. 64, but “I just don’t really condone it.”

“I’m not going to be out there picketing” if the initiative passes, she said. “We could just put other things in place of a dispensary.”

The litany of objections around town is long: The community is too residential. Dispensaries would attract undesirable visitors. It would be hypocritical to allow cannabis sales after banning tobacco. Those who want cannabis can already easily get it by delivery or driving to a nearby city.

“It cheapens a high-end beach town,” said Charlene Harding, 59, a retired government worker who moved to Manhattan Beach two decades ago. Though she has “never even puffed,” she said she did not care if others smoked — within reason: “I hate when I go to the beach and it smells like skunk.”

The opposition is far from universal, however, despite what city officials say they have heard.

David Sulaski, 54, a retired investment banker who has lived in Manhattan Beach for six years, said the city was full of “fun-loving people” who would embrace dispensaries.

“This is a community that likes to have a good time,” he said as he walked his dog down Manhattan Avenue in the city’s commercial center. “I don’t know why we make decisions that fly in the face of those things.”

Sulaski, who uses cannabis “every day that I can” and gets it delivered, said it was silly to make people go elsewhere to buy cannabis when Manhattan Beach could benefit from the tax revenue.

“We don’t expect our freedoms to be restricted in California. We could live in a red state for that,” he said. “Just give people what they want.”

‘Weed doesn’t change that’

Tax revenue may be the most compelling reason for cities to finally allow retail sales. Officials in Redondo Beach estimate that each license could generate as much as $1 million per year for the city.

State regulations also require testing cannabis products to ensure they are free of contaminants before they can be sold in licensed dispensaries, a safeguard that does not exist on the illicit market.

Derek Glunts, who grew up in Manhattan Beach, began smoking in high school and bought cannabis that he said was cut with chemicals at an illegal dispensary that presented itself as a church.

“Every single product they sold there was fake. They would turn black within a week and genuinely our lungs would hurt afterwards.” Glunts said. “I had a friend who was coughing up brown stuff from his lungs repeatedly for weeks and weeks after smoking some of the stuff he bought.”

The 21-year-old student was recruited last year to serve as the proponent for the Manhattan Beach initiative by a childhood friend, who had already signed on as a proponent for the petition in Redondo Beach. Both were longtime customers at Catalyst Cannabis.

Glunts, who has a medical cannabis prescription to treat anxiety and depression, said he enjoys smoking because “it takes the edge off things” and connects him to a community, though he has been taking a break in recent months to focus on his mental health.

Not even old enough to vote when Prop. 64 was on the ballot, Glunts said he was proud to be starting a conversation around cannabis use in a community that has long acted as though it wasn’t happening there. His family is in full support, he said, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive, aside from elitist and traditional residents who worry about riffraff coming to Manhattan Beach just to buy cannabis.

“The biggest battle is just getting over that stigma, that image,” he said. “Weed doesn’t change that. It’s not like weed’s going to come in to Manhattan Beach and all of a sudden, the schools are going to start performing poorly, people are going to move away, we’re going to have a bunch of bachelors move in. That’s not the reality.”

‘They’ve had six years to figure this out’

The Catalyst Cannabis team’s strategy was to target places where support for Prop. 64 was high and “city councils were just dithering and failing to act,” Lewis said.

Splitting the approximately $300,000 cost with another cannabis brand, Tradecraft Farms, they circulated petitions last year to overturn the bans on retail sales in the four beach cities. Once they collected signatures from at least 10% of registered voters, officials could either adopt the ordinances as written or put them to the ballot.

Their model was El Monte, a city in the San Gabriel Valley where the team first tested this blueprint three years ago. After presenting the city with enough signatures, the council ratified the ordinance, rather than hold an election, because the voters had already affirmed their support for legal cannabis with Prop. 64. The first dispensary, operated by Catalyst, opened last October.

None of the cities in the South Bay followed suit, however. The firm resistance caught Lewis by surprise, and he said he regrets not engaging with local officials to try to get them on board before launching the initiatives. He acknowledges that the sneak attack may have undercut any opportunity to reach a compromise and avert an election fight, though he also believes “incompetent” council members are using his approach as an excuse for their underlying opposition to cannabis.

“It just hits them in a way that they’re not used to. But I am who I am,” he said. “They’ve had six years to figure this out.”

While Manhattan Beach plots to uphold its ban on retail cannabis sales, its neighbors have not gone quite as far in their opposition. Hermosa Beach and El Segundo, which are set to vote in November on allowing two storefronts each, are considering adding competing measures to the ballot that would create a local cannabis tax or allow dispensaries under more restrictive rules.

Redondo Beach, the biggest of the beach cities and the most valuable potential prize among them, has signaled the most openness to the commercial cannabis market.

Before banning retail sales in 2017, the city council deliberated allowing dispensaries, and it established a steering committee to continue exploring that option. The local mall, the South Bay Galleria, has been particularly enthusiastic about serving as a potential site as it struggles to recover from losing its anchor department store.

Those discussions, however, languished for years, which the Catalyst team cited as an impetus for taking the issue to voters. Redondo Beach Mayor Bill Brand, who has used cannabis to treat the nausea from chemotherapy for lung cancer, said the city always planned to repeal the sales ban, but it was not a priority, especially during the coronavirus pandemic.

“I haven’t had people in the community beating down on our door to do anything,” he said. “We tend to focus on things the community’s concerned about.”

‘Slash-and-burn strategy’

The qualification of Catalyst’s initiative, which would allow as many as three dispensaries in Redondo Beach, has made it unavoidable.

City council members punted the measure to the March 2023 ballot, giving them more time to finish developing their own ordinance based on recommendations from the steering committee. That more restrictive framework — which would only allow two retailers, impose a 5% sales tax and establish a 1,500-foot buffer zone around schools — is on track for approval as soon as August.

Councilmember Zein Obagi Jr. said the city wanted to strike a “reasonable” balance that would better accommodate feedback from residents, many of whom he said do not oppose cannabis but are wary of a dispensary opening near where they live or their children walk to school. Like other local officials in the South Bay, he vehemently opposes the proposal from the Catalyst team, which he calls a “slash-and-burn strategy” to create a commercial cannabis monopoly.

“They framed this initiative to virtually give themselves a license,” Obagi said. “This didn’t sit right with any of us.”

These accusations set Lewis off. He repeatedly denies that he is trying to establish a monopoly — yet he admits there are criteria written into the initiatives that would benefit Catalyst when applying for a dispensary license. The system cities would use to evaluate applicants, for example, awards points for being a union operator, which Catalyst is. The company already leases properties in Manhattan Beach and El Segundo that fall within the eligible areas for cannabis businesses.

“We’d be stupid if we didn’t try to take a little bit of an advantage,” Lewis said. “But those self-serving things are very, very mildly self-serving.”

Now, tensions between Catalyst and the beach cities are only deepening — Lewis is circulating a petition to recall Obagi, whom he calls “fake” and a “douchebag” — and it seems increasingly likely that they are headed to a campaign showdown. That means spending more money on a political fight that Catalyst and its allies cannot use to build out their businesses.

Still, it may be worthwhile for Lewis, who said he could probably pay off what he’s invested in the initiatives with just one new store in the South Bay, though he worries that the city officials will scheme to block his applications for a license.

“They’ll make sure I lose,” he predicted. “On a good day, if I get one or two, I’ll be f—ing happy.”

And despite the bad blood his approach has generated, Lewis is ready to try again, perhaps with some slight modifications. He said he’s considering targeting as many as 10 more cities across California over the next year.

“If the initiative is bad, step the f— out of the way,” he warned. “It’s called democracy. Let the voters decide.”